VMC Lab Environment

A collection of scripts and Ansible playbooks required to provision a VMC lab environment. You can find more detailed documentation on this repository here.

Customize strings.yml file

The strings.yml file contains some strings that will be unique to your lab. You should review all options to ensure they conform to your requirements. Most importantly, ensure that:

1. userid is the unique value used to identify the user
2. domain_name will be the name given to your Active Directory domain, and should be registered to you on the Internet if you intend to expose some services externally.
3. network_subnet is the subnet under which all your machines will reside.

Create the ansible vault

The ansible vault file contains all the sensitive data that should not be left unencrypted on the control node. There is a sample_vault.yml file that contains all the values expected to exist by the playbooks in this project. Modify it with the correct values for your environment then encrypt it and rename it to vault.yml:

mv sample-vault.yml vault.yml ansible-vault encrypt sample_vault.yml

Prepare Lab Environment

The following assumptions are made regarding the vSphere environment that will be hosting this lab.

1. The PortGroup used by all machines follows the naming convention john-192.168.70.0-24.
2. A resource group with the same name as the userid selected in strings.yml.
3. A workload folder for your virtual machines with the same name as the userid selected in strings.yml.

Create a bootstrap ISO

Before running the playbooks for Windows and Linux template creation, generate the bootstrap ISOs from the source by running the following commands from the repository root, which will generate a bootstrap ISO for CentOS, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2019:

mkisofs -l -relaxed-filenames -V OEMDRV -o /tmp/bootstrap_centos.iso ./bootstrap/centos mkisofs -l -relaxed-filenames -V OEMDRV -o /tmp/bootstrap_win_10.iso ./bootstrap/win_10 mkisofs -l -relaxed-filenames -V OEMDRV -o /tmp/bootstrap_win_2019.iso ./bootstrap/win_2019

For creating both Windows and Linux templates, a response file is needed to provide answers to all installation parameters that would normally be specified during a manual install. For Windows, that takes the form of an autounattend.xml answer file, and for Linux that would be the anaconda-ks.cfg kickstart file. Those files are included in the bootstrap directory of this repository. There are two options for including these bootstrap files during installation:

(i) Modifying the installer ISO to include the bootstrap file (ii) Creating a separate ISO with the bootstrap file and mounting it as a second disc

Option (i) allows us to make other useful customizations to the installer ISO that will make the installation process even more automation-friendly, but the process is tedious and not worth the added effort. The playbooks therefore assume a bootstrap ISO file exists in a specified datastore and will take care of mounting it before booting the installation ISO.

Once the bootstrap ISOs are created in /tmp, be sure to upload all of them to VSphere.

Create the OS templates

To create the OS templates, run the create_[OS]_template.yml playbook corresponding to the OS you're creating a template for. The playbook will take care of creating the virtual machine, installing the OS per the bootstrap file specification in the bootstrap ISO, configuring the machine hardware, and converting it into a template.

⚠️ When creating a Windows template, the bootable Windows installation disc requires a key to be pressed during the boot process in order to boot into the disc. For this reason, the Windows template creation will display the boot disk selection screen to give you enough time to press a key to boot from disc.

Run a playbook

To run any of the playbooks included in the project, the command to use will have the following format:

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini --ask-vault-pass playbook.yml

You will be prompted for the vault password you chose earlier.